


Hiraeth

by Awenna



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Exile, Found Family, Gen, Home, Returning Home, especially for booker, exploration of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:26:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26089396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Awenna/pseuds/Awenna
Summary: This is a story about exile, about a home you can never hope to return to.It is an exploration for Andromache, Nicolò, Yusuf, Sébastien, and Nile of what is home to them and how they lived their separation with it as they became immortals and lived with their immortality.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	Hiraeth

**Author's Note:**

> The Poetry Foundation has a newsletter which they send around with a new poem every day. The other day, they shared the poem "Nocturnal Tripping" by Raza Ali Hasan and the first two lines gave me inspirations to write like it had never happened before.
> 
> Hiraeth is a Welsh word for the nostalgic longing for a place which has changed or does not exist anymore.
> 
> I have lived away from the place of my birth for 6 years now and I moved from places I considered to be my home in that time as well. And I guess my brain had a lot of thoughts about this idea and how it could apply to those five people.

_"My itinerary is the eternity of exile._

_Deferred is the trip back into domicile."_

Raza Ali Hasan, "Nocturnal Tripping"

_Andromache_

“There was a time when I was worshipped as a god,” she had said to Nile during that first day in the plane. It was true. During those first decades, centuries maybe, she had lost count, had wanted to lose count and not remember, she had had a status above that of other mortals. Which she was, she knew now even if one of extremely long longevity, she did not then. She had stayed in her community after her first death, until it was time to move on. Until she got tired of being worshipped, of being alone among people, long after her mother and sisters had died. She had started to travel, first alone and then with Quýnh and with Lykon. They had moved throughout the lands, in Asia and in Africa. They had gone back to what had been her home. It was gone. The place she had been born in, where she had been raised, was gone. Nature had grown back, people had moved. She had still been able to find a hill, a mountain, a cliff, which gave her a view of the valley where her village had been. Nature was ever changing, but the view was the same even after those centuries. Time had taken what was human and left the rest.

After Lykon had died, they had continued to travel with Quýnh, aware now of the fallibility of their immortality. No longer did they face death unaware that the next one could be their last. She wondered why it was that Lykon had gone, why his immortality had left him. He had looked ready to go. She was not. She had Quýnh.

They had not gone back to the land of her birth and slowly, the millennia helping, she had lost the exact location to time. She had tried to find it on more than one occasion as they were crossing continents moving from one fight to the next. But the earth was big and there were battles to be fought. She had lost her name as well, slowly losing what had been hers when she was born and was slowly being lost to time. Her language, her culture, her people had disappeared. Some had evolved with the centuries, slowly moving further and further away from what she had known. Some had simply disappeared with the last of their descendants dying. She was the last one, the last one of her people, the last one to speak a language long forgotten that she was forgetting herself. It was as if pieces of her were drifting in the wind, slowly being replaced until there was nothing that had been there at the beginning.

Time had passed, continued to pass, new immortals had come, Quýnh had been lost to the sea and she had been lost to her grief. She had continued, loving her family, going through the motion, slowly losing faith, little by little.

And now that her immortality had left her, she was thinking once again of the land she had left all those millennia ago. Her memories of that time were hazy: a flash of colours, a mountain in the background, the feeling of the wind on her cheek, in her hair. Her life had been long, so long, too long maybe. She had long since lost the place she had first called home. Her roots had been moving along with her family, Quýnh, Yusuf, Nicolò, Sébastien, Nile. Could it have been any other way with such a long life? Probably not, but the ache in her chest from what time had left behind, from the village of her childhood was still there and time could not heal it.

_Nicolò_

When Nicolò had left Genoa to go fight in the Crusades, it is a part of himself he had left, before even his first death. He had made the decision to join the soldiers of God going to fight for what he still thought at the time was the good fight. He had known that he was likely to die. He had made peace with that and had said his farewell to his family with a feeling on both sides that it would be the final time they were to see each other. He had been right on both counts. He had not seen them again and he had died. What he had not expected was that he would wake up after his fatal injury. The first few years had been a blur. The fighting with the heretics, the meeting with Yusuf, first on the battlefield and then on the fireside of their first real talk after they had stopped trying to kill the other, trying to understand what was happening to them in a mix of the languages they both knew. They had first travelled, trying to get to know one another and to find a purpose in their God-given gift. They had stayed on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, travelling to all the great cities, Constantinople, Bagdad, even Cairo, but never as far as Yusuf’s birthplace and never to the place that would become Italy many centuries later. Even when they did make it to that side of the Mediterranean, they never crossed to Genoa. Nicolò was afraid of what he would find or rather what he would not be able to find, what would be missing. He did not want to face this part of himself he had left behind that first time he had left the city convinced he would not return.

Maybe it was the reason why he felt he could not return. He had said his goodbye. What would it mean if he were to step into the city once again? What would it mean that he did not believe that he had made the right choice in joining the Christian forces? (Only meeting Yusuf had made it worth it. And even meeting the love of his life did not lessen the wrongness of his actions, of the actions of the people he had fought with, he had fought for.) He had gone to fight for the glory of God and had only seen the depravity of men. What would it mean if he came back to a city that was the same in name only, where the streets he had loved were changed so much he could not recognise them, where his family wad gone, had long been gone?

He had seen the change in Constantinople, the city they had called home several times over the decades, always changing, always reinventing itself, coming back even from ashes, them the only things unchanging. The flow of time was constant, passing them like the water in a river, faster and faster as they stayed, as rocks in the middle of the stream, unmoving.

Could he come back to the city that still haunted his dreams and his memories, the city that only existed in his mind? Was he ready to see the city anew and to have his memories replaced by this new place? Could his memories be wrong enough with time that even the streets and buildings still standing would be unrecognisable?

In the end, they had gone back. Yusuf holding his hand, always there at his side, always having him as he was and holding him in the current of time. He had cried. His heart had ached. The streets he remembered had changed, some completely and some still kept traces of the past. His city was there and was gone. It felt the same and it felt different. The spirit he had been raised in was still present, but different enough that he felt like he was walking slightly off-beat.

He had chosen long ago to leave his family name to use the name ‘di Genova’, using this new last name as the last thing linking him to his past, to his birthplace. It was a thread which linked him to somewhere no matter where they travelled, first alone and then with Andy and Quýnh. But it was now broken. In reality, maybe it had been broken for a long time and he had not noticed, hoping against all hope that he still had a place he could call home, the home of his birth. That first night, he had cried, emptying himself the feelings he had been holding for centuries, grieving of what he had lost. The following morning, he had woken up with the sun and the birds. Yusuf had already been awake, starting his day with his prayers. While looking at his beloved with the sun shining on his face, he had felt deeply within himself the threads, new and old, which linked the both of them. It was a home of sorts, one which would accompany them wherever they went as long as they were together.

_Yusuf_

His family had been merchants for as long as they could remember. They had been travelling all over the Mediterranean, but always coming back home. Even when instability had made them move to Cairo when he was older, it had been as a family. They did not have an ancestral home like some others, they simply made it wherever they went. When he had gone to Bagdad and then Jerusalem and had joined the fight against the Franks, he had done so partly because he had made a new home in each of the places he had ended up living in. He did not believe that you needed to have roots in a place for generations to make it a home. It was the people you were with which mattered. It was the way you felt, the feeling of contentment you felt when you knew you were in the right place. He was Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad Al-Kaysani, he was the son and the grandson of great men. They mattered more than the country of their birth. His ancestors had been nomads, travelling from place to place, he was continuing this tradition and meeting new people, discovering new culture, which only made his own grow. After his first encounter with Nicolò, their fights and finally their discovery of the other, he had welcomed the other man into his heart and made him part of his home. He had grown into the man he was today because of the interaction between their own personal cultures, traditions, and the ones around them. They moved often, because of conflicts and because of their unchanging faces and bodies. They never stayed long in one place and their life continued the way Yusuf’s always had. Their home was each other and the people they met.

They visited places he had lived in before his first death. Some things had changed, but the spirits had stayed the same. They were trading places for a lot of them. The merchants had changed, the marketplaces sometimes had as well, but people stayed the same. There was something reassuring in the fact that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. The caliphs, the kings, the emperors succeeded one another, coins changed shapes and weights, clothes evolved, but the heart of people stayed.

When he looked back at drawings he had done, he could see there the shape of a window, there a particular hat, there again the smile of a child. Decades sometimes separated each drawing, yet he could find echo of each when he looked up throughout the centuries.

There was one place, they found themselves coming back to regardless of the century, regardless of where they had been, regardless of how long they had been travelling with Andromache and Quýnh, Malta. They had built a little house on the side of a cliff on one of their numerous trips to the island, one day when they had been travelling to the island after they had lost Quýnh. They had felt tired and weary of the travelling and had wanted to settle for a little while. They had done so with this house and the small garden at the back. They had not interacted so much with the inhabitants of the villages a few kilometres away. They preferred to bask into each other’s presence. Yusuf had never felt the need to put roots in a place. He could put his roots in people like he had done with his Nicolò and with Andromache and Quýnh. They grew stronger there. Yet, he appreciated the fertile soil of their little house in Malta. The roots he grew there could be left when they started travelling again and they would grow on their own.

The next time they came back to Malta and to the little house, the roots had grown into trees and they could stand with Nicolò in the middle of them, holding each other’s hand, having made their home with one another, and having chosen this place for themselves.

_Sébastien_

Sébastien had known he was destined to die far away from his home when he had taken the decision to join Napoleon’s army to avoid prison and death. Death was probably going to come, but there was at least a possibility that he would make it back alive, regardless of how tenuous the hope was, hope it was. Then the campaign in Russia had taken a turn for the worse and he had wanted to desert, try to find a place he could live, far from his home, but where he could survive. And he had been caught. And he had died far away from home. But then he had not stayed dead and Andromache, Yusuf, and Nicolò had found him, had saved him from the never-ending Russian winter and taken him back to France, to his home. He had decided that he wanted to spend all the time he could with his family. The other immortals had lived for so long that they did not remember what it was to have a family that you were born with. None of them had had children. He could not abandon them. And so, he had stayed.

His home was the same that it had been when he had left all those months prior. He was not. Dark dreams of fighting and dying woke him up at night. He felt like a stranger in his own home. His family was moving at a pace which was different from his own. This feeling was only aggravated when they all started to grow old and he did not. They started to die, and he stayed the same. They had questions for which he had no answer and little by little, the place which had held his heart became an empty shell, the only warmth from his memory of a time before he was sent away, before this wretched curse had transformed his life. The final straw was when Jean-Pierre died with this look of hatred in his eyes, this resentment in the words he uttered. It had truly broken him. He could not return home because he had destroyed it. He had wanted to come back and now even his memories were tainted. He could barely remember the happy moments he had lived with his sons when they were but infants playing the garden of their city house. Those were now but fragments which he could not remember without also remembering those final words, without remembering that they were all dead and that he had seen them die and had been unable to help them. He had failed as a husband and as a father. He had no home to return to and he did not deserve such a home.

Instead, he fell into alcohol. He drank to forget, and he drank to subdue the emptiness and the pain which had become his constant companions. He had found the other three after that, or rather they had found him one day as he was drinking his day away in a shabby bar in Brussels. He had joined them and had found some form of companionship with them. He still ached, but he could at least get busy. They did not replace the family he had lost, but they slowly became a family of their own. Yusuf and Nicolò were a unit of their own and he shared a grief with Andromache. It was not much, but it was something to help him going. He was unattached to any place on the planet, never staying for too long in one place, often coming back to France, nothing better than French eau-de-vie to get yourself blind drunk, but never to Marseille. His home was gone and in its place was nothing but pain, an injury he did not care for and which he let fester. Fester so much he let it that he ended up feeling like nothing could ever cure it and nothing would help but death, the one thing that was refused to him. He had made a pact with the devil, not that he had known that at the time, and he had hurt his family, the one he still had, the one he could still hold, all because he could not let go of the one from his memory. And now he had lost them as well, at least for a time, maybe forever for Andy and he had brought it down upon himself. He was alone with no home to return to and only his eyes left to cry.

_Nile_

When she had left to join the Marines, she had known that she might not come back or that even if she did, she would be changed. She had seen the effect it had had on her dad even if she had been too young to truly comprehend what was happening to him. Joining the Army had that effect on people, even when you did come back you were different. You felt different, you looked different, and you could not relate to the things around you the same way. But you also joined something bigger than yourself. With Dizzy and Jay, she had found a temporary home. It was not to last forever, but the moments they shared with each other and the relationship they had created were strong. They had needed them to be. It was not always easy, but it was there. She could not consider the camp in Afghanistan to be home, she would not remember it as a real home, but it was a temporary one made up of the people around her, who had come here with the same ideals that she had.

When she thought about it afterwards, she could only feel pain: Pain about having been an instrument of violence against civilian populations, even if she herself had not, she had been part of a system. And that system had turned against her. She had not had time to process it at the time, everything had happened so fast: her first death, her flying to France then to the UK, the fight, and the freeing of the other immortals. Everything she had built her life upon had been swept from right under her. She had had to find her balance again and then to think about what had happened and what would happen next.

She had nearly been sent to a lab in Germany for testing, whatever that would have ended up meaning. She had seen the looks and the comments by the other Marines that afternoon, how quickly they had turned against her, even Dizzy and Jay. That had hurt more than she could comprehend at the time. They had always been there for each other, the three of them, since before their deployment in Afghanistan even. They had been the ones she turned to on evenings when it was hard, they had shared stories and memories from home, and now, they were gone. She was gone. All of the things she had thought would be her life, the people who would be in it, all of that was gone. They had turned against her and she had left.

And she had left her family. Her mum. Her brother. The people who were closest to her. The people who had made her who she was, who had been here for her, just as she had been here for them after her father died. She had left her community behind, the people she would see playing on the basketball court behind the school every day, the grandparents who would cook delicious food to be eaten after the Sunday service. She had lost all of this. She could have gone back. She had wanted to go back at first. She still had time she had told herself. But she had seen the toll it had taken on Booker and on his family. She did not want that for them. She wanted them to continue on living, to grieve and be able to reinvent themselves. To feel like she had not abandoned them like she would were she to come back and then disappear or stop showing up in person so they would not suspect that she was staying the same as they were changing. Or rather that she was changing, but not in the way they expected her to. She could make peace with letting go of her childhood home, only checking her family and community from afar and trying to find solace in the new group that she would be calling her family after enough time had passed. It was not what she had imagined her future to be, her home to be, but then when was your future ever what you expected it to be?

**Author's Note:**

> "and only his eyes left to cry" is a reference to the French phrase: "n'avoir que ses yeux pour pleurer" which means both "He could do nothing but weep" and "He had nothing but the clothes he stood in" because I like pain.  
> I'm not great at tags, please feel free to suggest any you think might fit.  
> I would have liked to include Quýnh, but I don't feel like I know enough about her to do a good job. If we learn more in the next film, I might come back and revisit this story, who knows.
> 
> I hope you liked this. Please leave a kudo and a comment if you liked it. <3  
> You can find me @dontbesoevil on tumblr.


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